They are "get to know you" games. They give people an excuse for social interaction--so you don't get those long blank moments where nobody knows what to say. You can only talk about the weather for so long. They also help you learn the details of your friends, so you can improve your interactions with them. Then again, since this is slashdot, I suppose I shouldn't expect anyone to understand basic social interaction.
It sounds like the social networking sites don't know or don't care about security and privacy. Big shock. If any of them are programmers, they are probably VB programmers. The whole MS / MCSE culture doesn't care about security, and they are often hostile towards it.
Public key cryptography would solve the problem. You could give your public key to anyone without worry they could use it to impersonate you. Well, unless they are able to calculate the private key from the public key, but from what I understand this is currently impractical for even the NSA if you use a decent key size. Maybe quantum computing or advances in mathmatics may change the situation, but we will have to just find something else at that point.
We could've had a public key system in place nearly ten years ago. It is just the people who run government agencies, congress, financial institutions, etc. either don't know or don't care.
You wouldn't need anti-virus to stop an autorun trojan from running if the crappy OS didn't automatically run code off of every piece of media which touches it. This is the problem with MS products. They don't think about security except as an afterthought.
I don't think anti-virus software is necessarily useless, but it should be the third or forth line of defense, just like firewalls. However, with how much malware is out there, anti-virus detection is becoming more and more unrealistic. Even with the constant advances in processing speed and storage, how long can we really keep up with a massive database which catalogs every piece of malware which ever existed?
Text adventures use brief language for a reason. You wouldn't want to type out "please move my avatar to the west" every time you need to move west. Most of them shorten it down to one letter.
It is great you came up with a natural input method, but you have to think about your target audience.
I am beginning to think the entire swine flu thing is fear mongering. This flu sounds a lot like what went through my dialysis center in Feb. (I live in Idaho.) My guess is this flu has already spread through the US, it just isn't nearly the issue here because we have better medical care.
It sucked pretty bad and a lot of people got really sick. However, most of the people there are already old and have serious kidney problems, so take that into account. I think it caused serious long term complications for a few of them (they were already old and have serious health problems), but I don't think anyone died from it. As far as I know, none of the nurses / techs who got it had serious trouble more than a regular flu. Though it did cause a shortage of techs for a while.
The people who died in Mexico probably died because the healthcare isn't as good down there. If you have symptoms, go see your doctor or an "urgent/quick" care clinic and you will probably be fine. Don't be stupid and be active while you are supposed to be recovering--unless you really have to. I wouldn't waste a hospital visit on this unless it gets really bad. The hospitals are busy enough, and you probably don't have that kind of money.;-)
Yes, there are serious problems with healthcare in the US, but don't equate it with Mexico's.
Casual setup of sudo is the biggest security hole. On my Asus EEE running the pre-installed Xandros, they have sudo enabled for everything and passwordless as well. If you turn it off, you can't shutdown or boot up. WTF? Then again, they also have an ancient vulnerable version of samba since the last time I checked updates a month or so ago, and the kernel is vulnerable to the vmsplice exploit. Easy root access with no user interaction.
I managed to disable samba, and I found the programs to enable in sudo so I could shutdown the system, but it wouldn't boot up! They locked down the system tight so it is very hard to access the boot process, so it took some panic and effort to get it working again.
Perhaps they need a console font? I think the VGA console needs it in either a raw bitmap or psf format.
For paranoia, I would think they should look to OpenBSD. They are the origins of many secure features in open source software: OpenSSH, OpenSSL, and so on. They just need people who can maintain it for them. After all, *nix style systems are really designed to have administrators maintain the system, while the users use it instead of trying to do the maintenance themselves.
If Linux is the choice, I have concerns about both Red Hat and Debian. They both seem to like using either experimental versions (gcc 2.96), maintainers try to "fix bugs" (OpenSSL weak keys), or use weird or unstable patches. I have been wanting to try Slackware as a base (as far as I can tell they don't dick with core projects), with the ability to install Debian apps using apt-get.
The best I've been able to do is just download Slackware packages from Slacky.eu and Slackware's Alien and manually converted Debian packages, and installing them manually. I think slacky has a few apt-get like utilities, but I don't use them...
Then again, since this is probably for a massive group of people, they should create a Linux distro for the Dalai Lama. Just take packages from Slackware (for the core) and rpms/Debian for the end user apps which aren't in slackware--alien will convert these formats and slackware comes with an rpm2tgz utility, compile a custom kernel (maybe with some security patches which work and you are certain are stable), create any custom packages you may need (such as a Tibetan font) and make your iso image.
Unless you think they will have limited hard drive space or need to only install specific packages, just have it install everything for the basic or default option. Or perhaps it should just be a live CD which stores/home on the hard drive--this would probably be more secure as no one can modify your system software on the disc. Perhaps you could even use
Slax as a base. They seem to have an easy drop-in live packaging system. It will be work to get it right, but I think it will be worth it.
They will need to find someone who can do this though, but it will be easy for someone who is a decent programmer and knows the *nix command line. Debian packages are just tarballs inside.ar archives. Slackware packages are just strait tarballs. The mkisofs man page talks about the switches to make a bootable image (look for "El Torito"). There also appear to be tutorials how to make bootable CDs.
So the fact anyone can lie and say they own copyright to another's work or use it as if they have copyright is Google's fault? The same thing can be done to the Copyright Office, printers, or countless other places. Employees of large (movie, software, music) companies have done this, often without the knowledge of their management, and those companies were sued for copyright infringement. Should we shut all these places down because someone may trick them into innocently infringing on copyrights? How would someone know if a picture you claim is yours is really yours?
This goes back to the photo developer issues, where shithead photographers put pressure on various places like Walmart, so if you tried to have anything remotely decent looking developed, you'd have to go through a lot of shit to convince the idiot teenager behind the counter you took the photo yourself. This in a time where high quality multi-megapixel cameras are common, so nearly every picture you take would look somewhat "professional."
This is why I think the Creative Commons system is not really helpful in some ways. Someone who would take another's work without permission also would not have any problem slapping a public domain stamp on it. Legal sophistication and stating intentions for a work is a good idea, but it doesn't really fix the problems with sharing works and collaborating with strangers.
There is no magic way to know a work was really created by someone else. How do you know I didn't just cut and paste this post from somewhere else? You can't because you would have to be omniscient to do so. Sometimes you know because it was copied from a popular big media work or from your circle of friends, but that is not always the case.
The parent post was brought to you by the Democratic National Committee and the Ad Council.
It is time to start ignoring posts about political parties. Nearly everyone here is just using it as an excuse to paint themselves in a perfect light, while painting anyone who disagrees with them as an unreasonable extremist freak. But then, this would be what political parties were designed to do. Too bad no one cares about real issues.
If the Mormons are involved like the guy said, then it has everything to do with this story. You are really fucking dense if you don't see it. WTF does it matter if "my boogyman" did it or not. For one, it is the exact same bullshit they pull in Utah. Secondly, the story is about closing a place where they serve alcohol. Hmmm... someone trying to keep alcohol from being more freely served. I guess you are right, none of those things could possibly be related! We shouldn't talk about any of this and just let the government reestablish prohibition because alcohol is evil. Then we'll spray pixies and fairy dust everywhere and the world will be perfect!!!
I don't expect "freedom" from the existence of other religions. I just expect they not be hostile towards other's freedoms and beliefs. My religion has no problem with alcohol or gay marriage, and in fact, there is no social reason to ban them, so why should I be forced to follow their religion?
I'm sure you are thinking, that isn't so bad. They are a moral people. Well, do you like pictures of women in swimsuits such as Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue? I have heard plenty of Mormons say it is "pornography." How about coffee or tea? Hot drink is against their religion (yet they drink hot chocolate), now illegal. Smoking? In the same chapter of the Doctrine & Covenants. What if you need to go to the grocery store on Sunday? Can't allow that, that is their sabbath. Doesn't matter if non-mormons have no problem working on that day, they won't be allowed. I could probably go on for a long time. Different cultures and religions have varying beliefs, and it is unreasonable to have to follow other's when .
They have not been able to successfully ban these things because of the Constitution and people protecting our freedoms.
If you knew the people of Utah, you'd know they use laws to force people to follow their religion and squeeze others out. Why do you think the constitution was written this way? Because they knew there are people out there who would take away religious freedom in this way. As I understand, the Taliban operates this way. Is a ban on shaving religious? I guess not? So it is okay to ban shaving and wearing suits in Utah, even though most modern Mormons attribute men having a cleanly shaved face and wearing a suit to church as part of their religious and cultural identity. After all, I'm just banning an activity, not someone's religion...
What I write is based upon 25 years of experience in Utah. I gave them every chance to prove they all weren't a bunch of bigots. They failed in every way possible. How about you? Do you know what you are talking about?
I think you are mostly correct in that Mormons weren't the only influence for MS higher ups to drop the pub. However, I don't doubt this guy's story at all. LDS leaders and organized groups in their religion are always trying to establish their religious beliefs as the law of the land. Screw the Constitution I guess, unless it benefits them.
Note this is people in Idaho and Utah trying to influence an election in California. I can tell you, if people in California tried to influence an election or legislation in Utah, they'd be going apeshit about it. For the next 10, or perhaps 100 years they'd be whining and complaining to anyone who'd listen that people in California were trying to persecute and oppress them.
I live in Idaho,and just last week, I heard an offensive ad on the radio denouncing some stimulus bill because it relaxes the number of alcohol permits. I wonder who paid for this ad? The ad was claiming alcohol causes "crime" and all sorts absurd crap. Methinks the US has just as many religious zealots as they do in the Middle East. If someone doesn't believe in religious freedom, what are they doing in this country?
I think a lot of the unfunny jokes and trolls and "first posts" are from actual children, and perhaps some mentally ill adults in the mix. Seriously who else would think some of the crap they write is funny or even worth the effort to write. It looks like the Internet has replaced the TV as the "universal babysitter." All of the "think of the children" idiots say we should censor the Internet, but really we should keep the children off the Internet. It wasn't built for them.
If I ever get my forum going, I want to find a way to filter out anyone under the age of 17 or so.
IQ level discrimination: maybe make the captcha also an IQ test too? Anyone not smart enough can't post.
But then the big companies won't be able to get free "bailouts" from the governments, and they'll have to do desperate things to make money....like selling goods and providing services for reasonable prices. Oh no!
So if you are doing a massive 3d render (or other processing job) which takes hours or days and the program doesn't store its work on disk until it is finished, then you lose all that work because MS decided at that time to update your computer. How nice.
Or perhaps it does save, but you lose the time it would be working because obviously you aren't at your work computer at 4AM to restart it.
The saturation point is when Hollywood bankrupts itself on all these high budget piece of crap movies targeted for children and teenagers, then asks the government for a massive bailout larger than AIG's because of "piracy".
I think most people would be more satisfied with lower budget movies, but put more thought into them. Hollywood focuses on special effects and the lowest common denominator so much, they don't think about much else.
Funny, I could say "the problem with Christians is that they personally attack anyone who doesn't belong to their one true religion." In fact, from what I've seen, the majority seem to do this. It must be because their clergy is always telling them their religion is the only "one true" religion and everyone else is wrong. They also like to call anyone who doesn't belong to their religion "atheists" or "devil worshippers" regardless of what religious belief these people may or may not have.
But that would be a major sweeping generalization. I have met a few Christians who weren't total asshats towards "evil nonmembers." Some of them were even pleasant. Imagine that.
Most likely, this test would open the employer up to a massive Americans with Disability Act lawsuit. I have kidney failure and had two strokes, so I'm sure I would fail all the "hypochondria" questions. In fact, looking at some of the first "hypochondria" questions, I would fail them because I also have acid reflux. I am sure quite a few disabled people, or even people with minor medical problems would fail the "hypochondria" questions. I'm amazed at how fucking scumbags like to shit on people who have medical problems (even minor ones), yet think they are great people who should have a rock star's salary. I hope they come down with a major medical problem and their own firm fires them.
Obviously they are trying to weed out people with disabilities whether or not it applies to the job. This would also detect people who don't even know they have a disability. It could even be a condition which no one in their right mind would consider a disability or even a problem, yet these productive people will be eliminated from having a decent job.
I have seen a common thread where when someone comes down with an ailment and they don't know what it is, persist for years just trying to get doctors and friends and family to even recognize it--instead often being called a hypochondriac, lazy, or whatever. Sometimes there are treatments, but they won't find it if others just dismiss their symptoms. They also should be on disability but are not because doctors will not diagnose them and the system doesn't want people to know about programs or "qualify" for them.
Politicians write up "feel good" laws, but don't back them with the money. They just set them up to weed out as many people as they can, regardless of whether the applicant is really disabled, or a undeserving con artist. In fact, the con artists are more likely to get disablilty than a disabled person, because the bureaucrats expect the person to be able to "sell" themselves somehow. Like if you have a brain aliment you can somehow be a salesman. That makes a lot of fucking sense.
I'm sure there are many diseases we recognize now which were just called hypochondria before. MS, Aids, low level strokes, cancer all had times when even doctors didn't know what they were and undoubtedly diagnosed them as "hypochondria" (some probably still do)... until the person died from it. "I guess that person was actually sick." (Then again, the doctor probably just said it was "natural causes")
If you are not missing a limb or some other obvious outward problem, people just dismiss any medical problems you might have. Just by looking at me you couldn't tell my kidneys don't work or I have severe brain damage. They just think I'm "faking" it. Like I could somehow fake blood tests or brain scans. And of course they don't want me to work because there is no way I could fit into their 40+ hours/week sit at a desk mold. This day and age, people could probably work less than 10 hours per week if there wasn't so much paperwork bureaucracy bullshit and idiots didn't smash down so much on automation. (Automation makes our lives easier) Shitheads. Fine assholes, I'll just sit on my ass until I die. I hope you fuck yourselves into bailout hell with a thorny axe.
I do not see how using bittorrent would protect you. Contrary to what the RIAA and cronies say, all "illegal pirate" P2P programs don't make you untraceable. In fact, bittorrent very much does not. That protocol was made to keep download sites from being slashdotted, it does nothing to hide where your file came from. There have been some attempts to sort of make it that way, but I don't think they have been a success.
Use Freenet for that, as it was designed to hide who or where the file came from and muddy the legal waters as to whether they can evade enough reasonable doubt to arrest you. I suppose it may make it hard to sue you as well if you don't announce who you are. In fact, we should all be using Freenet for discussion, since it would make censorship of what we say difficult. Only problem: last time I tried it, it was a pain in the ass. I think they also have a closed development model, which explains why its progress is slow. They are still at version 0.7, isn't that 5 years old?
There is also GNUnet. Haven't tried it or heard much about it, and frankly many official GNU projects suck, but maybe it will take off somehow?
I think the thing is publishing the protocol. I am not sure the Freenet project has done this (in any digestable form, anyway), so I don't see how development can move forward since very few are able to work on it. GNUnet published a bunch of papers about their protocol, so I think it may be possible for others to write alternate implementations. Sort of like how the gnutella protocol was reverse engineered, and it became one of the most used P2P system, except the GNUnet people were more open from the beginning...
Though I am looking for something like this which will be a success. I am not sure where to go. So far, Freenet or GNUnet seem to be the best chance for freedom of speech on the Internet.
I don't understand why this guy is advertising his site on search engines. The locals can be informed about the site through other ways. From what I understand, spammers want page rank for their site, so if they get links on other sites which are read by google / search engines, their page rank goes up. Also they probably won't find your site if it is not listed or doesn't appear to be a forum from a search engine.
It just takes a robot.txt file. If you really do still want to be searchable, then make a sitemap and advertise it. Just don't advertise you have a forum. That and doing the other poster's knowledge test, you probably won't get anyone except on-topic locals.
You mean move the laser? Why not create an optical device to deflect the beam? I am out of practice, but it seems this would be far easier. Maybe there is some reason mfgrs don't do this (my guess would be a patent holder wants huge fees), but I am sure you could achieve much higher speeds than physically spinning the disc or laser.
Slashdot Mirror
A link would be nice.
They are "get to know you" games. They give people an excuse for social interaction--so you don't get those long blank moments where nobody knows what to say. You can only talk about the weather for so long. They also help you learn the details of your friends, so you can improve your interactions with them. Then again, since this is slashdot, I suppose I shouldn't expect anyone to understand basic social interaction.
It sounds like the social networking sites don't know or don't care about security and privacy. Big shock. If any of them are programmers, they are probably VB programmers. The whole MS / MCSE culture doesn't care about security, and they are often hostile towards it.
Public key cryptography would solve the problem. You could give your public key to anyone without worry they could use it to impersonate you. Well, unless they are able to calculate the private key from the public key, but from what I understand this is currently impractical for even the NSA if you use a decent key size. Maybe quantum computing or advances in mathmatics may change the situation, but we will have to just find something else at that point.
We could've had a public key system in place nearly ten years ago. It is just the people who run government agencies, congress, financial institutions, etc. either don't know or don't care.
You wouldn't need anti-virus to stop an autorun trojan from running if the crappy OS didn't automatically run code off of every piece of media which touches it. This is the problem with MS products. They don't think about security except as an afterthought.
I don't think anti-virus software is necessarily useless, but it should be the third or forth line of defense, just like firewalls. However, with how much malware is out there, anti-virus detection is becoming more and more unrealistic. Even with the constant advances in processing speed and storage, how long can we really keep up with a massive database which catalogs every piece of malware which ever existed?
Text adventures use brief language for a reason. You wouldn't want to type out "please move my avatar to the west" every time you need to move west. Most of them shorten it down to one letter.
It is great you came up with a natural input method, but you have to think about your target audience.
I am beginning to think the entire swine flu thing is fear mongering. This flu sounds a lot like what went through my dialysis center in Feb. (I live in Idaho.) My guess is this flu has already spread through the US, it just isn't nearly the issue here because we have better medical care.
It sucked pretty bad and a lot of people got really sick. However, most of the people there are already old and have serious kidney problems, so take that into account. I think it caused serious long term complications for a few of them (they were already old and have serious health problems), but I don't think anyone died from it. As far as I know, none of the nurses / techs who got it had serious trouble more than a regular flu. Though it did cause a shortage of techs for a while.
The people who died in Mexico probably died because the healthcare isn't as good down there. If you have symptoms, go see your doctor or an "urgent/quick" care clinic and you will probably be fine. Don't be stupid and be active while you are supposed to be recovering--unless you really have to. I wouldn't waste a hospital visit on this unless it gets really bad. The hospitals are busy enough, and you probably don't have that kind of money. ;-)
Yes, there are serious problems with healthcare in the US, but don't equate it with Mexico's.
Casual setup of sudo is the biggest security hole. On my Asus EEE running the pre-installed Xandros, they have sudo enabled for everything and passwordless as well. If you turn it off, you can't shutdown or boot up. WTF? Then again, they also have an ancient vulnerable version of samba since the last time I checked updates a month or so ago, and the kernel is vulnerable to the vmsplice exploit. Easy root access with no user interaction.
I managed to disable samba, and I found the programs to enable in sudo so I could shutdown the system, but it wouldn't boot up! They locked down the system tight so it is very hard to access the boot process, so it took some panic and effort to get it working again.
Perhaps they need a console font? I think the VGA console needs it in either a raw bitmap or psf format.
For paranoia, I would think they should look to OpenBSD. They are the origins of many secure features in open source software: OpenSSH, OpenSSL, and so on. They just need people who can maintain it for them. After all, *nix style systems are really designed to have administrators maintain the system, while the users use it instead of trying to do the maintenance themselves.
If Linux is the choice, I have concerns about both Red Hat and Debian. They both seem to like using either experimental versions (gcc 2.96), maintainers try to "fix bugs" (OpenSSL weak keys), or use weird or unstable patches. I have been wanting to try Slackware as a base (as far as I can tell they don't dick with core projects), with the ability to install Debian apps using apt-get.
The best I've been able to do is just download Slackware packages from Slacky.eu and Slackware's Alien and manually converted Debian packages, and installing them manually. I think slacky has a few apt-get like utilities, but I don't use them...
Then again, since this is probably for a massive group of people, they should create a Linux distro for the Dalai Lama. Just take packages from Slackware (for the core) and rpms/Debian for the end user apps which aren't in slackware--alien will convert these formats and slackware comes with an rpm2tgz utility, compile a custom kernel (maybe with some security patches which work and you are certain are stable), create any custom packages you may need (such as a Tibetan font) and make your iso image.
Unless you think they will have limited hard drive space or need to only install specific packages, just have it install everything for the basic or default option. Or perhaps it should just be a live CD which stores /home on the hard drive--this would probably be more secure as no one can modify your system software on the disc. Perhaps you could even use
Slax as a base. They seem to have an easy drop-in live packaging system. It will be work to get it right, but I think it will be worth it.
They will need to find someone who can do this though, but it will be easy for someone who is a decent programmer and knows the *nix command line. Debian packages are just tarballs inside .ar archives. Slackware packages are just strait tarballs. The mkisofs man page talks about the switches to make a bootable image (look for "El Torito"). There also appear to be tutorials how to make bootable CDs.
So the fact anyone can lie and say they own copyright to another's work or use it as if they have copyright is Google's fault? The same thing can be done to the Copyright Office, printers, or countless other places. Employees of large (movie, software, music) companies have done this, often without the knowledge of their management, and those companies were sued for copyright infringement. Should we shut all these places down because someone may trick them into innocently infringing on copyrights? How would someone know if a picture you claim is yours is really yours?
This goes back to the photo developer issues, where shithead photographers put pressure on various places like Walmart, so if you tried to have anything remotely decent looking developed, you'd have to go through a lot of shit to convince the idiot teenager behind the counter you took the photo yourself. This in a time where high quality multi-megapixel cameras are common, so nearly every picture you take would look somewhat "professional."
This is why I think the Creative Commons system is not really helpful in some ways. Someone who would take another's work without permission also would not have any problem slapping a public domain stamp on it. Legal sophistication and stating intentions for a work is a good idea, but it doesn't really fix the problems with sharing works and collaborating with strangers.
There is no magic way to know a work was really created by someone else. How do you know I didn't just cut and paste this post from somewhere else? You can't because you would have to be omniscient to do so. Sometimes you know because it was copied from a popular big media work or from your circle of friends, but that is not always the case.
The parent post was brought to you by the Democratic National Committee and the Ad Council.
It is time to start ignoring posts about political parties. Nearly everyone here is just using it as an excuse to paint themselves in a perfect light, while painting anyone who disagrees with them as an unreasonable extremist freak. But then, this would be what political parties were designed to do. Too bad no one cares about real issues.
If the Mormons are involved like the guy said, then it has everything to do with this story. You are really fucking dense if you don't see it. WTF does it matter if "my boogyman" did it or not. For one, it is the exact same bullshit they pull in Utah. Secondly, the story is about closing a place where they serve alcohol. Hmmm... someone trying to keep alcohol from being more freely served. I guess you are right, none of those things could possibly be related! We shouldn't talk about any of this and just let the government reestablish prohibition because alcohol is evil. Then we'll spray pixies and fairy dust everywhere and the world will be perfect!!!
I don't expect "freedom" from the existence of other religions. I just expect they not be hostile towards other's freedoms and beliefs. My religion has no problem with alcohol or gay marriage, and in fact, there is no social reason to ban them, so why should I be forced to follow their religion?
I'm sure you are thinking, that isn't so bad. They are a moral people. Well, do you like pictures of women in swimsuits such as Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue? I have heard plenty of Mormons say it is "pornography." How about coffee or tea? Hot drink is against their religion (yet they drink hot chocolate), now illegal. Smoking? In the same chapter of the Doctrine & Covenants. What if you need to go to the grocery store on Sunday? Can't allow that, that is their sabbath. Doesn't matter if non-mormons have no problem working on that day, they won't be allowed. I could probably go on for a long time. Different cultures and religions have varying beliefs, and it is unreasonable to have to follow other's when .
They have not been able to successfully ban these things because of the Constitution and people protecting our freedoms.
If you knew the people of Utah, you'd know they use laws to force people to follow their religion and squeeze others out. Why do you think the constitution was written this way? Because they knew there are people out there who would take away religious freedom in this way. As I understand, the Taliban operates this way. Is a ban on shaving religious? I guess not? So it is okay to ban shaving and wearing suits in Utah, even though most modern Mormons attribute men having a cleanly shaved face and wearing a suit to church as part of their religious and cultural identity. After all, I'm just banning an activity, not someone's religion...
What I write is based upon 25 years of experience in Utah. I gave them every chance to prove they all weren't a bunch of bigots. They failed in every way possible. How about you? Do you know what you are talking about?
Courage Campaign Condemns Proposition 8 Blackmail Letter.
I think you are mostly correct in that Mormons weren't the only influence for MS higher ups to drop the pub. However, I don't doubt this guy's story at all. LDS leaders and organized groups in their religion are always trying to establish their religious beliefs as the law of the land. Screw the Constitution I guess, unless it benefits them.
Just look at the California gay marriage issue:
Note this is people in Idaho and Utah trying to influence an election in California. I can tell you, if people in California tried to influence an election or legislation in Utah, they'd be going apeshit about it. For the next 10, or perhaps 100 years they'd be whining and complaining to anyone who'd listen that people in California were trying to persecute and oppress them.
I live in Idaho,and just last week, I heard an offensive ad on the radio denouncing some stimulus bill because it relaxes the number of alcohol permits. I wonder who paid for this ad? The ad was claiming alcohol causes "crime" and all sorts absurd crap. Methinks the US has just as many religious zealots as they do in the Middle East. If someone doesn't believe in religious freedom, what are they doing in this country?
I think a lot of the unfunny jokes and trolls and "first posts" are from actual children, and perhaps some mentally ill adults in the mix. Seriously who else would think some of the crap they write is funny or even worth the effort to write. It looks like the Internet has replaced the TV as the "universal babysitter." All of the "think of the children" idiots say we should censor the Internet, but really we should keep the children off the Internet. It wasn't built for them.
If I ever get my forum going, I want to find a way to filter out anyone under the age of 17 or so.
IQ level discrimination: maybe make the captcha also an IQ test too? Anyone not smart enough can't post.
I Found A Mistake In His Post: No Links to Hot German Chicks!
But then the big companies won't be able to get free "bailouts" from the governments, and they'll have to do desperate things to make money. ...like selling goods and providing services for reasonable prices. Oh no!
So if you are doing a massive 3d render (or other processing job) which takes hours or days and the program doesn't store its work on disk until it is finished, then you lose all that work because MS decided at that time to update your computer. How nice.
Or perhaps it does save, but you lose the time it would be working because obviously you aren't at your work computer at 4AM to restart it.
The saturation point is when Hollywood bankrupts itself on all these high budget piece of crap movies targeted for children and teenagers, then asks the government for a massive bailout larger than AIG's because of "piracy".
I think most people would be more satisfied with lower budget movies, but put more thought into them. Hollywood focuses on special effects and the lowest common denominator so much, they don't think about much else.
Funny, I could say "the problem with Christians is that they personally attack anyone who doesn't belong to their one true religion." In fact, from what I've seen, the majority seem to do this. It must be because their clergy is always telling them their religion is the only "one true" religion and everyone else is wrong. They also like to call anyone who doesn't belong to their religion "atheists" or "devil worshippers" regardless of what religious belief these people may or may not have.
But that would be a major sweeping generalization. I have met a few Christians who weren't total asshats towards "evil nonmembers." Some of them were even pleasant. Imagine that.
Most likely, this test would open the employer up to a massive Americans with Disability Act lawsuit. I have kidney failure and had two strokes, so I'm sure I would fail all the "hypochondria" questions. In fact, looking at some of the first "hypochondria" questions, I would fail them because I also have acid reflux. I am sure quite a few disabled people, or even people with minor medical problems would fail the "hypochondria" questions. I'm amazed at how fucking scumbags like to shit on people who have medical problems (even minor ones), yet think they are great people who should have a rock star's salary. I hope they come down with a major medical problem and their own firm fires them.
Obviously they are trying to weed out people with disabilities whether or not it applies to the job. This would also detect people who don't even know they have a disability. It could even be a condition which no one in their right mind would consider a disability or even a problem, yet these productive people will be eliminated from having a decent job.
I have seen a common thread where when someone comes down with an ailment and they don't know what it is, persist for years just trying to get doctors and friends and family to even recognize it--instead often being called a hypochondriac, lazy, or whatever. Sometimes there are treatments, but they won't find it if others just dismiss their symptoms. They also should be on disability but are not because doctors will not diagnose them and the system doesn't want people to know about programs or "qualify" for them.
Politicians write up "feel good" laws, but don't back them with the money. They just set them up to weed out as many people as they can, regardless of whether the applicant is really disabled, or a undeserving con artist. In fact, the con artists are more likely to get disablilty than a disabled person, because the bureaucrats expect the person to be able to "sell" themselves somehow. Like if you have a brain aliment you can somehow be a salesman. That makes a lot of fucking sense.
I'm sure there are many diseases we recognize now which were just called hypochondria before. MS, Aids, low level strokes, cancer all had times when even doctors didn't know what they were and undoubtedly diagnosed them as "hypochondria" (some probably still do) ... until the person died from it. "I guess that person was actually sick." (Then again, the doctor probably just said it was "natural causes")
If you are not missing a limb or some other obvious outward problem, people just dismiss any medical problems you might have. Just by looking at me you couldn't tell my kidneys don't work or I have severe brain damage. They just think I'm "faking" it. Like I could somehow fake blood tests or brain scans. And of course they don't want me to work because there is no way I could fit into their 40+ hours/week sit at a desk mold. This day and age, people could probably work less than 10 hours per week if there wasn't so much paperwork bureaucracy bullshit and idiots didn't smash down so much on automation. (Automation makes our lives easier) Shitheads. Fine assholes, I'll just sit on my ass until I die. I hope you fuck yourselves into bailout hell with a thorny axe.
I do not see how using bittorrent would protect you. Contrary to what the RIAA and cronies say, all "illegal pirate" P2P programs don't make you untraceable. In fact, bittorrent very much does not. That protocol was made to keep download sites from being slashdotted, it does nothing to hide where your file came from. There have been some attempts to sort of make it that way, but I don't think they have been a success.
Use Freenet for that, as it was designed to hide who or where the file came from and muddy the legal waters as to whether they can evade enough reasonable doubt to arrest you. I suppose it may make it hard to sue you as well if you don't announce who you are. In fact, we should all be using Freenet for discussion, since it would make censorship of what we say difficult. Only problem: last time I tried it, it was a pain in the ass. I think they also have a closed development model, which explains why its progress is slow. They are still at version 0.7, isn't that 5 years old?
There is also GNUnet. Haven't tried it or heard much about it, and frankly many official GNU projects suck, but maybe it will take off somehow?
I think the thing is publishing the protocol. I am not sure the Freenet project has done this (in any digestable form, anyway), so I don't see how development can move forward since very few are able to work on it. GNUnet published a bunch of papers about their protocol, so I think it may be possible for others to write alternate implementations. Sort of like how the gnutella protocol was reverse engineered, and it became one of the most used P2P system, except the GNUnet people were more open from the beginning...
Though I am looking for something like this which will be a success. I am not sure where to go. So far, Freenet or GNUnet seem to be the best chance for freedom of speech on the Internet.
I don't understand why this guy is advertising his site on search engines. The locals can be informed about the site through other ways. From what I understand, spammers want page rank for their site, so if they get links on other sites which are read by google / search engines, their page rank goes up. Also they probably won't find your site if it is not listed or doesn't appear to be a forum from a search engine.
It just takes a robot.txt file. If you really do still want to be searchable, then make a sitemap and advertise it. Just don't advertise you have a forum. That and doing the other poster's knowledge test, you probably won't get anyone except on-topic locals.
You mean move the laser? Why not create an optical device to deflect the beam? I am out of practice, but it seems this would be far easier. Maybe there is some reason mfgrs don't do this (my guess would be a patent holder wants huge fees), but I am sure you could achieve much higher speeds than physically spinning the disc or laser.